


Stay With Me Among the Strangers

by cricket_aria



Category: Ready or Not (2019)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Injury Recovery, an all-around win, demonic presence remains clear but is pretty hands-off with winners, not accurate hospital living
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:07:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27308947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cricket_aria/pseuds/cricket_aria
Summary: Though Grace would have sworn she saw Charity's bullet tear through Daniel's throat, when she turned back the wound was only in his shoulder; still dangerous but less immediately deadly. Mr. Le Bail has one last knife to twist in the Le Domas family before their final loss, one which will make things turn out all the better for the two players on the opposite side of the game.
Relationships: Daniel Le Domas/Grace Le Domas
Comments: 7
Kudos: 155
Collections: Shipoween 2020 - The Halloween Ship Exchange!





	Stay With Me Among the Strangers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Highsmith (quimtessence)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quimtessence/gifts).



> Whoops, I meant to have this out as a treat before the archive opened, but forgot about timezones!
> 
> Dedicated in part to/inspired in part by my mom, who during a long hospital stay used to drive the hospital staff crazy by vanishing without notice to hang out in places she liked better than her room.

The pistol smashed into the side of Charity’s head with a satisfying crack and she dropped in an instant. It was strange, watching her fall, for Grace to remember that less than a day ago she’d never hit anyone before in her life. She’d never even have thought her arms were strong enough to make an impression; back when she was a kid she’d always been one of the ones who struggled to even do a single pull-up in gym, and though she kept herself in shape as an adult in her mind she still judged her strength by that little girl she’d been. If anyone had told her she’d be capable of quickly knocking people out, even if they’d mentioned one of those people would be a small child, she’d have wondered who the hell they were confusing her with. 

She guessed fighting for your life must be even better than steroids when it came to giving the old muscles a boost.

But Grace didn’t have long to feel satisfied about her handiwork before a groan behind her reminded her that there was something more important to worry about now that the immediate threat was taken care of. “Daniel,” she gasped as she whirled back towards him, unable to think of anything more to say than repeating his name as she stumbled back to his side. When she knelt beside him she stopped for just a moment, blinking at the blood bubbling out of his wound. 

The wound just below his shoulder.

She would have _sworn_ that she’d seen the back of his throat burst open from the bullet tearing straight through it, an injury there’d be no recovery from without more first aid supplies and knowledge than she had on hand and then a miracle on top of that. But the skin there was clean and unbroken where his loosened collar gaped open, his breathing harshened by pain but not gasped through a shot-open windpipe or choked with blood. 

She’d seen it wrong, she told herself firmly as she shook off the momentary stupor. It wasn’t like she’d had more than a second to take in what had happened to him before she’d advanced on Charity, and with all the horror of that night it wasn’t surprising if her brain was starting to trick her into seeing everything around her in the worst possible light. But the wound he did have was dangerous enough on its own. For all that movies treated the area like a safe spot to injure, Grace knew that it could be shockingly easy to bleed out from wounds there; a girl with a cutting habit that she’d once shared a foster home with had almost committed accidental suicide when she sliced too deeply into the flesh below her armpit, thinking it would be a safe and well-hidden spot to take a knife to. From the way Daniel was bleeding, much faster than her own bullet-wound had, she thought that Charity might have struck that same dangerous artery.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she whispered, sliding her fingers into the hole the bullet had made in his sleeve and tearing down to fully reveal the wound beneath. “Fuck, Daniel, I think we’re gonna have to see if I can remember how to tie a tourniquet.”

He shook his head and she could see how it sent a full-body flinch through him when even that small movement caused him more pain. Still he whispered, “Can’t waste time on me. Get out of here.”

“Fuck that,” she said fiercely, tugging his bow-tie free as the cleanest bit of fabric nearby that was the right general shape. “You saved my life, I’m not leaving you to die. Not if I can help you.” Maybe her own chances of survival would have been higher if he’d really had been throat-shot, and she could have told herself there was nothing she could do for him if she just ran, but that wasn’t something she could regret.

“Grace,” he said, too soft, too gentle to match with everything that had happened that night, “if this curse is real, it’s you or us. I already picked you.”

Five minutes before Grace would have thought the night had wrecked her too much for tears, but at that she felt her face twisting and had to take a deep breath to fight them down. Wasn’t finding someone who cared enough to fight or die for you supposed to be a dream? It didn’t seem right, didn’t seem remotely fair to Daniel, that she was getting that in the form of her drunken brother-in-law, while her actual husband was no where to be seen and had only tried to help her in ways let him avoid actually confronting his family directly.

She hadn’t even really believed in Daniel, for all her insistence that she did. Not deep-down, the way he was proving he’d deserved. She just thought after their talk in the study that he’d be the most likely to give in to guilt if pushed.

All that flashed through her mind in an instant, then she shook her head firmly and reached out to grab one of the million candlesticks filling the halls as the best thing she saw for torsion. “And if the curse is bullshit then I’m not letting you bleed out here when help is already on the way. If there’s any way we both can live than we’re gonna, you hear me? I promise we will.”

After a moments hesitation he nodded slowly, and though she didn’t see any hope in his eyes it was enough acceptance for her to take it. He was right that she didn’t have time to waste. She was willing to spend enough of it to stopped the blood from draining out of him, but there wasn’t any left for pep talks.

* * *

When she’d managed to stop the bleeding without anyone else coming across them there’d been a brief, hopeful, moment when she’d actually thought maybe things would be okay from there. That if they’d been left undisturbed for that long than the rest of the family must not have expected them to still be so close to their fucked up game room. That she’d be able to sneak out right behind their backs, meet up with the police officers that Justin hopefully really had sent for her, and have Daniel taken to the hospital, the rest of his family taken to jail, and Alex… well whatever happened with Alex would depend on where the hell it turned out he’d been all that time.

Even once that measure of her luck ran out and she started running into the family again it still seemed to be going well. Tony went down easy, and Becky died only slightly harder. Grace thought that she should feel _something_ about that, the night successfully turning her into a killer, but mostly she was just relieved that there’d permanently be one less person hunting her down.

Like Daniel had said, as far as the family was concerned it had been them or her all along. They had no right to bitch about it if she did everything she could to make sure it was her.

But then, Alex. Alex who’d always been so sweet to her, who less than twelve hours before she would have sworn she’d love for the rest of her life, Alex had turned back up at last. And the absolute fucker had seemed to turn on her not because his mother’s corpse was at her feet, which Grace would at least have been able to understand (understood while in the back of her mind a voice would have been saying ‘But Daniel chose her life over all of theirs’), but because he seemed to realize he was going to lose her either way and decided he’d rather it be at the end of a knife. She hadn’t even _known_ , until he sealed it in that moment, whether she’d really given up on being with him, or if she’d have stuck it out with enough therapy between them. Part of her was almost grateful he’d made it so completely fucking clear what the right choice would be.

Through the haze of fear and anger that filled her mind as she was manhandled to their table she found enough clarity to at least be glad when she saw that someone had found Daniel and that her make-shift tourniquet still seemed to be holding up to the job of keeping his blood in. She was less glad that when they dragged him in they handcuffed his good arm to a couch; no saves coming from that corner this time.

For his part, Daniel’s eyes were as wild as Grace imagined her own must look as he took in Alex joining with the rest of the family. “What the hell are you doing? _Alex!_ ” he shouted as he yanked at the cuff, trying to get free. She could tell that there wasn’t as much strength behind it as he’d had earlier in the night, weakened from his injury and blood loss.

Guilt seemed to flash across Alex’s face for just a second, though Grace didn’t think it was over what he was doing to her. He only cared that he was falling in his brother’s eyes. “I have to, Danny,” he said weakly. “She killed mom, did you see that? And even if she lives, I’ve already lost her.”

“ _You already had,_ ” Daniel sounded absolutely enraged, and at least there was still one person in the world who could be so ferociously on her side. “You’d already lost her, we’d already lost mom, trying to save her was never going to end with everyone getting to play happy family Alex!” As Alex turned away from him, as the chanting rose in volume around Grace, Daniel’s eyes found her’s and held them. “I’m so sorry, Grace,” he said, sounding abjectly miserable, “I’m so fucking sorry I didn’t help you soon enough to matter.”

Maybe it was shock at hearing one of the blood-born members of the family, even if it was the least favorite among them, openly admitting that he was willing to cause the death of them all that made Helene’s grip loosen, just for an instant. Just long enough for Grace to force her shattered hand to bend, to dig in with her nails tightly enough that Helene shrieked and let go at the pain, and she was able to twist her body aside enough to take the knife in her shoulder instead of her heart then tear herself free in the confusion.

Grace flung herself between Daniel and the group as she yanked the knife free of her flesh and brandished it at them, her free arm flung out to protectively block the path to him. Protecting him and protecting herself were the only things left that could matter to her, the rest of her mind gone half-feral with pain at this last injury heaped on all the others.

Then they noticed the light seeping in through the windows.

As everyone else flinched and cowered Grace felt a gentle touch to her injured hand. Daniel’s fingers curled around hers lightly, so lightly, not constraining her at all if she felt the need to run, or causing her any more pain than the hand was already screaming with. It probably even hurt him worse, having to move his shot arm to do it. “Hey, you made it,” he said softly, no fear at all for his own well-being in his voice, only happiness for her sake.

One thought managed to make it through the haze of her mind as she carefully made her fingers bend again, this time to lace them through his as well as she could manage; why couldn’t she have met him first? She knew even as she thought it that it was a stupid thing to want; even if she had he’d have already been married to Charity, and, she was suddenly positive, would never have spent a minute in a relationship with a woman he actually liked, knowing what it could lead to. Knew that without the horror of that night between them she’d never have even looked twice at an alcoholic, amiable of one though he usually was. Meeting him before Alex would have done nothing, changed _nothing_.

She wished it anyway.

Then Helene was lunging at her with an axe. Daniel’s hand tightened as he tried to yank her back out of its path, both of them grunting in pain when she landed in his lap, just as Helene exploded into a shower of blood and gore in front of them.

It was like a chain reaction from there, the family bursting one after another. Grace felt hysterical laughter bubbling up at how absolutely ridiculous it was mixed with absolute relief as every threat to her safety vanished before her eyes, but it died in her throat as she felt Daniel’s hand slowly slide away from her’s and realized what was coming. “Grace,” he said quietly, his tone far too accepting, “you need to get up. This won’t be a fun place to sit in a second.”

“No,” she told him, staring blankly forward. She didn’t want to see, but she didn’t want to leave him. “No, it’s not supposed to end like this. We’re supposed to save each other.”

He huffed out a quiet humorless laugh, and she felt his forehead drop to rest between her shoulder-blades for a moment. “Yeah, that is a nice fantasy, right?”

Alex was approaching, babbling apologies, and she instinctively shied closer into Daniel’s chest when he reached out to touch her. He stopped, something hard flashing through his eyes that would have been completely unfamiliar to her a day before, but then he went on about her being his second chance, about her saving him, and she went shock still.

“Is that how it works?” she asked to the air around them, her voice dull to her own ear even with the fragile hope she could feel fluttering in her heart. “My husband gets to live, even when everyone else in the family dies?”

She saw Alex’s eyes light up, but ignored it to turn in Daniel’s lap instead. With sudden clarity she could see that the entire night had been leading right to this moment. It was why a shot she’d sworn was fatal had shifted while her back was turned, why it now came down to only him and Alex lingering. Mr. Le Bail was giving the knife one last twist before the end. She just had to hope that Alex was his only target for it, not all three of them together.

“Daniel, marry me,” she said quickly, taking his face between both her hands.

He blinked at her blankly, not seeming to have followed the same train of thought that she had. “What? Alex…”

“Alex can fuck right off,” she snapped, unable suppress the flash of rage at the man she’d married, but at Daniel’s pained expression it faded again, “Sorry, sorry, I know he’s still your baby brother, but… you can’t think I’d ever forgive him. You can’t save him, but let me at least try to save you.” She leaned forward, pressed her forehead against his, and quietly went on, “You’ve been single for all of three seconds, I’ll be too any instant now, I’ll take you for my husband if you’ll take me for your wife. And besides…” a sob caught her by surprise, the tears she’d thought herself all dried out of welling up at the thought of him dying too, and she had to drop her voice to a whisper to force the rest of the words out around the knot in her throat, “…even if this doesn’t do anything, I’d rather be able to think of myself as your widow than his.”

She was barely even aware of Alex shouting angrily behind her, grabbing at her injured arm to try to pull her back, completely focused on holding Daniel’s eyes with her own in spite of the tears until he finally gave her a small nod and and even smaller smile and said, “Okay. Sure. Let’s be married.”

She leaned into kiss him, a chaste closed-mouth press of their lips to seal the vow that no authority on earth could see them making, as Alex’s blood rained down over both of them.

* * *

It felt almost comically easy to just walk out of the house then, even with the fire that was soon raging around them. The biggest concern was just finding the key to the handcuffs holding Daniel’s hand to the couch. She found it sitting neatly on the table right in front of Le Bail’s seat, where it _definitely_ hadn’t been before.

She tried not to think about that too much, or about the figure wreathed in flames that she’d seen in the chair for just an instant. She hadn’t asked for the help finding it, she hadn’t offered to make any sort of deal in exchange for Daniel’s life, she didn’t owe him _jack_.

They staggered out through the flames, leaning against each other as well as they were able when there were so few places left on her that could be touched without pain, and collapsed on the stairs as soon as they were far enough from the house to be safe from the fire. They were found there by horrified officers and paramedics when Justin’s call for help for her finally actually showed some results.

Everything went kind of hazy from there, as they got some good drugs working through her with startlingly fast effect while loading her into the ambulance. She had just enough presence of mind to go “Hey,” to one of the paramedics, waving weakly towards Daniel, “Hey, don’t give him anything that reacts badly to alcohol. He got through part of the night by stress-drinking.”

“Thank you for letting us know, Miss,” the woman said kindly, and that was the last thing she really remembered until she was waking up in a small private room in the hospital. Her body was thick with bandages, and she somehow felt more filthy than ever now that just the portions of her that had been scrubbed to treat her wounds were clean and her dress had gone stiff and crusted around her.

Funny, she’d assumed that at least that would be taken care of when she woke up.

She fumbled around slowly until she found the buzzer to summon the nurse, a little surprised that there hadn’t already been anyone hovering around when she came to. They couldn’t have been far though, because a young man was pushing through her door with a bright smile on his face just moments after she’d hit it. “You’re finally awake!”

“No shit Sherlock,” she grunted, then even though his smile didn’t falter at all she quickly caught herself and added, “Fuck, no, sorry, I don’t want to be an asshole. It’s just been one hell of a day.”

“Don’t worry, Miss,” he said kindly, moving to her side to begin the comfortingly mundane task of checking her vitals, “nobody who saw you when you came in will hold it against you if you’re a bit testy. Do you feel up to answering a few questions?”

“No allergies that I know about,” she said wearily. “I don’t know my family history. My birth control stops my period so it’s been awhile since the last one. That type of thing?”

“Exactly that type of thing,” he said with a smile, “but maybe not until I’ve grabbed the form?”

It was easy enough to go through the answers of a standard paperwork, right up until he asked about her marital status and it hit her like a punch in the gut. “Oh, fuck, I… widowed? I… I don’t…”

“Oh, oh sweetie, no,” the nurse said, rushing over to pat her uninjured hand. “Mr. Le Domas is going to be _fine_. He’s just a few rooms down.”

“What?” she asked, blood running cold. “He can’t be, he was just… _blood_.”

“But that tourniquet he says you tied did just what it needed to. By the time you both got here you were in more danger of bleeding out than he was.”

“…Uh-huh,” she said blankly, then answered the rest of the questions with her mind whirling. When the nurse left, saying he had to grab some people that she assumed meant she was about to face a doctor for a more thorough check-up, Grace quickly found the remote for the TV on the wall and flicked it on. It didn’t take long at all to find a news channel giving an update on the tragedy that occurred on the day of gaming dynasty heir _Daniel Le Domas’s_ wedding. Listed among those missing and presumed dead in the house fire were his younger brother Alex, and Alex’s wife Charity.

“What the fuck?” she said to no one. She remembered the hasty vow she’d exchanged with Daniel, still meant it just as much as she had then, but had never imagined anything like this coming of it. And she wasn’t sure she really wanted to owe the devil her thanks for easing her transition into being with a man other than the dead one she’d married a day before. 

If they were even going to be together. It wasn’t like they’d had time to talk about what they each thought would come of their ‘marriage’. She was game to see where things went if he was—she was a little horrified and a little amazed at herself about how easy it had been to fall out of love with Alex and be open to someone else, but she supposed that was what came of one man trying to put a knife in her heart while the other was willing to die to save her—but it seemed like a particularly dickish move to go ‘So, I know the woman you actually married the normal way literally just died, but do you want to go out dancing or something once we’re both less full of extra holes? You can’t be that broken up about it, everyone knows you couldn’t stand her even before she went and shot you.’

Not really the best note to start a fresh relationship on.

As the TV droned on about its twisted version of events, beyond her supposed spouse only different due to lack of information she suspected, she absently twisted at the ring on her finger. Someone had moved it to her right hand while she was unconscious, probably thinking they were doing her a kindness by keeping it where she could still easily see it when her left hand was buried in gauze. With everyone in the world now seeing it as a token from the good man who’d helped her survive through that horror-show of a night, instead of from the absolute piece of shit who’d actually slid it onto her finger, it would probably raise some eyebrows if she gave into the temptation to tear it off and chuck it into the trash.

Then she actually glanced down at it, and her eyebrows shot up. It looked like the identity of her husband wasn’t the only thing that had changed.

The style of the ring was still the same as the one she and Alex had picked out together weeks ago, same sized stone, same design to the band, but the look had entirely changed. The metal had become a burnished gold that gleamed in a way that reminded her of fire, and the diamond had been replaced by a large ruby that looked like nothing so much as a fat drop of blood that had settled onto the setting.

The weird thing was that this new look of it actually relaxed her a little. It might be a reminder of the demon who had touched her life, but that was still better than it being as strong of one for the man who had almost served her up to him. And it was a sign close at hand to remind her that the one she’d bound her life to really had changed, for the better.

She would have gone to Daniel at once if she had the option, see what his thoughts were on everything that had happened, but the moment she tried to start unstrapping herself from the equipment that didn’t seem to go directly into her body at any place machines began to scream around her and she realized she was stuck. She wasn’t getting anywhere until she was a little less monitored.

In the meantime she’d just have to do her best to ignore the new paranoid voice in the back of her mind screaming that being monitored in any way was the last thing in the world that she wanted.

* * *

Reaching him took even longer than she’d first imagined it would. First, along with the doctor the nurse had brought back a couple of police officers, who asked her questions as they went over her body for evidence in a way that made her feel like maybe she really was just a corpse and her mind had failed to get the memo. She vaguely wondered whether Daniel would have tried answering their questions in a way that would protect the memory of his family, disgusted though he’d so obviously been by them, but she assumed he had to realize she wouldn’t give enough of a fuck to try and told the truth as clearly as she could.

She even left in Daniel knocking her out in the woods to feed her up to them, aware that he carried enough guilt that she couldn’t expect him to have sugar-coated his own actions in whatever he told them, but heavily stressed that he’d then immediately used that pulling the family together to try to incapacitate them all and get her away cleanly. The only place she massaged the truth a little was at the very end, knowing that ‘and then they all exploded’ wasn’t likely to go over well. She leaned back tiredly in the bed as she finished up her description of the night, telling them, “Fuck, I was such a mess by the end that I think I was seeing things because after the sun came up I swear I saw them explode. I think maybe one of them must have had a gun and just, like, snapped when they realized curses aren’t fucking real and they’d done all that anyway, and my brain just took all the blood flying that way? I… Alex, it would have had to be him, he was the last to go and was… he was the most conflicted about what they were doing all along. Before the bastard ended up deciding to side with the family instead of me and Daniel.”

Well, the only place she’d massaged the truth except for remembering throughout their questioning to say that Daniel was the one she’d married that day. It was surprisingly easy to keep in mind, that was the only marriage of the day that was going to matter anyway.

After the police and the doctors were both done a couple more nurses came in and helped her maneuver herself into the shower to clean off at last. Her dress went into an evidence bag, the bedding she’d been lying on in all her filthy misery pulled off, swapped out, and hopefully thrown in an incinerator in the short time they were helping her scrub herself down. By the time she was done with that any thought of still trying to sneak out to find Daniel was discarded, because just a few minutes being up and about, even with most of them spent sitting down on a shower stool, had left her feeling wiped out and full of renewed pain. It must have been adrenaline alone that had kept her moving so long in spite of her injuries, because without it it seemed like her body had decided it was done with even trying to function.

Or maybe it was a warning she failed to noticed until the fever set in that night of the infection setting in from her hand. Apparently all the medicine that had been pumped through her wasn’t enough to overwhelm immediately plunging a fresh bullet wound into a cesspit filled with rotting corpses and god only knew what other filth, then slapping on a make-shift bandage caked in that same filth. That took that thought of getting up, or much of any thought at all, out of her mind for days more.

But at last, at _last_ , she was out of danger enough that the number of machines around her was pared down, the number of checks on her for anything other than medication dropping severely in number, and that very night after the nurse on duty made their last checks before the lights went down she waited until she heard them leave the area and slipped out into the hall. He was only a few rooms away, she’d been told that first night, and sure enough it didn’t take peeking through the windows of many doors to spot him and slip into his room.

He was flipping through the channels on his TV she she came in, and didn’t notice at first who’d just entered the room, greeting her with a tired, “I already said I don’t need any—” before he turned enough to see her and the words died in his throat mid-sentence.

He looked almost terrified as she moved closer, though she couldn’t imagine why. Or maybe it was just the same nerves she suddenly felt at facing this man she’d _so_ easily picked over her own husband after a single night, the man who had picked her in return over his whole family, now that the terror and adrenaline of that moment had faded away and they had to face each other clearly understanding just what they’d done. The man who _was_ her husband now, with neither of them really knowing what that meant yet.

Then she got a little closer, realized how shaky and flushed he looked in the flickering light from the TV screen, and realized that maybe there was something else at play. “Holy shit, Daniel,” she said, dropping into the chair by his bedside, “I just barely got past them thinking they might need to amputate my hand, so why are you the one who looks half dead here?”

And maybe nerves were still part of what was wrong with him after all, because when she talked to him like everything was normal between them his face seemed to relax a little as he bit out a harsh laugh, “Turns out the DTs are a bitch and a half. You should’ve seen me a couple days ago, we were having some real fun then.”

“I did try to, but the hand thing.” She propped her elbow on the edge of his bed and rested her forehead in her good hand, a wry smile creeping across her face, “God, could you imagine if we’d made it through all that only to die because you’re a lush and I managed to get shot by a small child?”

“Recovering lush, if the therapist they keep throwing at me has anything to say about it,” he corrected her, though he didn’t sound especially hopeful about the chances of that, pessimism made even clearer when he added, “We’ll see just how well that works when she keeps saying things about recovery really starting when we can ‘dig into the roots’ of my addiction. Don’t really feel like getting myself carted to the loony bin by saying ‘Well, Doc, the whole family worshiped Satan and I dealt with it by never being sober enough to think about it.’ Still think I’m doing better than Emilie snorting anything she could get her hands on.”

“I mean, yeah, that’s true,” she agreed, and turned her eyes to the TV so she had an excuse not to look at him as she carefully added, “though I’d sorta like to not be widowed young a second time because my husband drank himself into an early grave. Which, I know is _a lot_ easier for me to say than it would be for you to do, but still.”

She heard him hiss in a sharp breath, and when she brought herself to glance at him out of the corner of her eye she could see he was staring at her with an indecipherable look on his face. After a long moment he reached out, touching her hand as gently as he had in that moment when her heart had turned in his direction, but all he said was, “How are you holding up?”

“Mildly fucked, but hanging in there. They don’t think I’ll ever get back full use of my hand, like ‘they’re amazed I can bend it as well as I can’ sure that it’s screwed, and the knife messed up the nerves in that arm too, so thank god I’m right-handed.”

“Sounds like we match,” he said, and when she finally looked fully at him he slightly shrugged the shoulder of his bandaged arm, “nerve damage here too.”

“Okay. Well, if that’s the case I need to think about which of my friends are likely to make horrible samey couple jokes so we can avoid them until I think I can hear that type of thing without wanting to throw a punch.”

He was silent for long enough that Grace was starting to worry she might have been poking too hard at a subject he didn’t actually want to face. Then he sighed and said, “Listen, I know my family hasn’t given you much reason to expect anything but the worst from all of us, but you know I’m not going to try to force you to actually commit to this whole _thing_ don’t you? We can get the marriage annulled as soon as—” then he cut himself off with a hiss and Grace caught the faint smell of burning skin and a glow coming from his left hand. When she looked over to it she saw his own wedding band had been transformed into the same ruddy gold as he own, and the outside edge now glowed with a heat that made it look more fiery than ever. After a moment he grit out, “Okay, maybe not an annulment, but after enough time has passed for things to die down a little we could file for divorce.” 

The glow grew brighter and Grace watched with horror as a dark stream of blood tinkled out of his nose, and she slapped her hand over his mouth before he could say another word. “I swear to _God_ , Daniel, if you get yourself exploded after _all this_ because you’re trying to let me off the hook I will pull an Orpheus and chase you down in the afterlife just to _throttle your ghost_.”

The feeling of his mouth moving under her hand, beard tickling against her palm, sent tingles running through her that they really were in no place to examine so she tried to push the thought of them aside for the time being and just focus on his words. Even muffled under her hand his voice sounded as miserable as he had the night of the game, “You don’t deserve to get trapped because of my family’s bullshit again. We’ll work something out, I swear I’ll never touch you if—”

This time the words were cut off by a heavy cough that left her hand feeling wetter than it should, and when she pulled it back her palm was splattered bright red. “I guess Le Bail’s a traditionalist,” she said flatly, wiping it off on his bedspread. Grace had seen _The Borgias_ , she knew there’d been a time when marriage was sealed at dick point. She was just glad that at least he apparently had enough sense of fair play to hold off on enforcing that point when they were both stuck somewhere that wasn’t about to let them get away with consummating anything.

“You could still just let me die,” he told her, sounding just as resigned to it as he had when the blood of his family was raining down around them. “Hitting on you might not have managed to make you rethink joining the family, but you obviously weren’t interested. I’m not going to rape you to live, I’d be as bad as the rest of them ever were.”

“For fuck’s sake, Daniel, I ignored it because you were my fiance’s married brother, not because I wouldn’t have ridden you like a horse if we were both free,” and maybe being that blunt wasn’t the best way to put it when he was still trying to spit out blood, as he literally seemed to choke at the words, but maybe bluntness would get through to him. Then she softened her tone and reached out to cup his cheek, turning his face towards her, catching and holding his eyes with hers, “If you’ve changed your mind and decided you actually would rather die than be married to me, fine, that would really suck but it’s your choice to make. But don’t you _dare_ say you’re making that choice for my sake, because I promise, I _promise_ , that if you stick it out with me then I… then _we_ , we will be so fucking happy together, and that I will love the fucking hell out of you and you’ll see you can love me just as hard. Do you know why? Because I am not giving that Le Bail piece of shit the _satisfaction_ of forcing us to stay together just to be miserable. Let’s rub every second of joy we can give each other in his hellspawn face for a long long time, okay?” Then she pushed herself up from her chair and leaned in to press her mouth to his.

Aside from the quickest of pecks Alex had always kissed her like her mouth was one more thing for the Le Domas gaming dominion to conquer, hard and consuming. Now she realized that she should have taken it as a warning, but at the time she’d called it passion and been thrilled at it. Loved that a man who was so sweet and gentle to her the rest of the time was driven to kiss her like that, to press her down into their into their bed and take her how he wanted her. How she’d wanted it too, then.

But Daniel, his mouth stayed soft and sweet against Grace’s even when one of his hands slowly crept up to tangle in her hair. He kissed her like with every move he made, every shift of his lips against hers, he was judging and rejudging whether what he was doing was okay, whether it was really what she wanted, whether he should pull away. Even when her tongue tentatively grazed along his lower lip he only opened his mouth to hers, greeting her tongue with his but not trying to delve into her own mouth in return.

Even knowing that he’d been forced into sobriety the entire time they’d been in the hospital she couldn’t help being surprised that she couldn’t taste alcohol in his mouth the way she’d always imagined she would if she gave into his advances (and imagine she had, though she’d never have admitted it before just then). Instead it was metallic with his blood, and she was sure that should have been a turn-off but she’d been drenched in so much of the stuff by then that it no longer bothered her.

When she finally pulled away his eyes were closed, his brow slightly furrowed with the concern that had seemed to take up home there ever since the sun went down on her wedding night, but there was a small smile on his lips. “Okay?” she asked quietly, bumping her forehead against his and watching that smile grow a little wider.

His hand was still in her hair.

“Okay,” he agreed, then laughed softly, “Damn, it’s a good thing Helene was gone before you proposed, she’d have lost whatever sanity she had left if she’d found out this was an option. Having a wife who wants to make me happy will be hard to get used to though.”

“God, I can imagine. How did you even let her sink her claws in you?” Grace couldn’t even picture Charity feigning warmth and affection long enough to trick him to the alter, especially with the three-year courtships Alex had mentioned. When he seemed to be hesitating over what to tell her she nudged him slightly, “Hey, scooch over,” she told him, and snorted when he raised his eyebrows at her, “Don’t give be that look, I’m not going to try to piss off the doctors by banging you in the hospital if Le Bail’s giving us a stay of execution. My back’s just starting to hurt from being up.”

Not as much as the entire length of her left arm still did all the time, but at least her back was the one she could do something about. Their beds were wider than hospital standard, though still not really meant for more than one person, them and the private rooms perks of being obscenely rich that she’d only finally picked up on when she’d grown more stable and they still hadn’t moved her into a shared room. He was shaking slightly when she curled up against his side, and sweating a little, and she didn’t know whether it was from her presence or just the withdrawal symptoms that had yet to fully release him. She curled her arm over his chest, hand pressed down where she could comfort herself with the feel of his heartbeat still pounding away, and when he covered her wrist with his hand she said nothing when two of his fingers settled against her own pulse point.

“So? Charity?” she prodded, not willing to let the subject slip away unless he outright told her he didn’t want to talk about it.

“You really can’t guess?” he asked dryly, and she stiffened slightly because, yes, unpleasant though it was she could imagine what his primary qualification for picking a bride would be. The one that had lead him to try to pester Grace away from the family when he realized that Alex hadn’t shared it. 

“What I don’t get,” she said slowly, quietly, “is why you’d marry anyone at all, when you seemed to hate what was happening so much. Even before I pulled a card, I could see how much you hated being in that room.”

“I was the heir to the family, dear, much as they wished that Alex had been born first,” and from what little she’d heard of him and Charity together she would have expected the endearment to be heavy with sarcasm but instead he just sounded tired, “Alex, Emilie, they both could have gotten away with staying single if they’d just committed to not pulling anyone else into the family bullshit, but _I_ was required to find a wife and at least appear to be trying to bring us the next generation of heirs. Which, I got a vasectomy the _minute_ I could sneak it behind their backs so I hope you weren’t hoping to start the family line back up.”

“Oh, god no. No offense, but you’re only alive because a demon’s allowing you to be. That just seems like a set-up to ‘And now you’re pregnant with the Antichrist!’ if there ever was one.” She curled a little closer to his side, not really wanting to talk about what plans she’d had with Alex but willing to give Daniel, “I always only wanted to adopt. Give some kids who need it a permanent home, instead of leaving them to bounce around foster care until they’re eighteen like I did.”

It was a red flag she never would have imagined she needed to catch, that Alex had so easily agreed with that desire even when he’d also sometimes talk about his family’s obsession with tradition and continuing its bloodline.

“That might be the first smart thing I’ve heard about Alex picking you,” he said, and when she swatted his chest quickly added, “in a good way, you’d better realize by now I always mean that type of shit in a good way. And that my marrying Charity doesn’t say a _single_ good thing about her. Did you know… well, obviously you didn’t, she’d gotten away with two hit-and-runs before I ever met her. The second one killed an entire family.” His voice was laden with disgust as he added, “I might have an alcohol problem, spending a fucking week hallucinating would make that obvious if it wasn’t already, but at least I have the decency to never try to drive on it.”

He also had the money never to have to, she didn’t say. With the topic at hand it would sound too much like she was trying to defend Charity rather than just pointing out that not many people could spend as much of their lives drunk as he had while being sure they never endangered anyone else by it. There was a part of her that wondered, though, if Charity was really as unaffected by that part of her past as Daniel’s tone suggested he thought she was; Grace had only met her a few times in passing before the wedding but she’d never seen her order a drink for herself. Grace had assumed than having a drunken husband made booze lose its appeal. She supposed she’d never have a chance to discover if there might have been a deeper reason that Daniel was too bitter over her to recognize.

“When I heard witnesses said a young woman was driving the car I used our own sources to track her down. She was completely fucking ice cold when I called her on it.” He shrugged, not looking particularly sorry himself as he listed, “She was single, she had no problem at all with selling her soul to get access to our money, and she was an unrepentant murderer. If she’d pulled Hide and Seek she would have deserved it, and that was the only thing I was really looking for.”

“And you didn’t try to find someone else who deserved it that you could actually get along with when you realized you couldn’t stand each other? Fucking Le Bail have rules against breaking an engagement?”

He shrugged, his shoulder shifting beneath her cheek. “They’d have killed her for knowing too much by then. If she’d had to play the game I could have sat and waited for whatever happened, unlike you she _knew_ the risk and walked into that room prepared for it. But outside of that…”

He didn’t want to be the one to serve even her up, Grace mentally finished when he trailed off. She tilted her head back, pressed her lips to his neck for just a moment, and murmured, “You really are a way better man than you think you are, Daniel Le Domas.”

* * *

She stayed with him until the nurse on duty found her during the first round of late-night room checks and shooed her back into her own bed. From there their relationship grew in first a series of stolen moments whenever she could make her way back to him undetected again, then openly visiting when they were given the okay to make the small trip between their rooms.

“I hope you realize I’m taking your name,” he told her during the next of them, when she was snuggled against his chest again trying to find something on TV that they could watch together.

“No way!” she laughed, even as she linked her free hand through his. “I couldn’t _wait_ to get rid of my name. Do you even know what it was? _Foster_. Someone ran out of imagination the day they were naming me and went the old school ‘name them for what they are’ route.”

“Do you still _really_ want to be a Le Domas?” he asked, his tone plainly stating how unlikely he found that.

“Okay, no. But we could pick our own name, couldn’t we? It doesn’t need to be mine, or yours, it could be one just for us.” Then, like a sign—something that had been happening too often lately, which she tried to put out of her mind not liking to think about who any real signs we likely to be from—the next flip of a channel landed her on an old adaption of _The Count of Monte Cristo._ She watching it for a moment, frowning thoughtfully, and said, “We could drop the ‘Le’, change a letter, and go with Dumas? We did escape a hell that started on my… or our, I guess, wedding day. And, you know, the bloody revenge thing, even if I didn’t end up taking too much of it myself. It works, don’t you think?”

“Still a little close for comfort,” he said, but squeezed her hand, “but yeah, it works.”

* * *

Another time, after she’d talked with one of her doctors in his room, he said, “Are you sure ‘Foster’ was really just a name they gave you and not the one you were born with? You said you didn’t know anything about your family history, and, in case you’ve failed to notice dear, we’re still somehow richer than fuck. I’m sure we could try to figure out what happened to your parents one way or another.”

“Alex said the same thing once,” she said quietly, the flashes of pain in her heart and his eyes at mentioning him already a little less severe than they’d been when the betrayal was still fresh. “I already decided I won’t. If they’re dead then it’s not like I’m gaining anything by finding out for sure. If they didn’t _want_ me… fuck, Daniel, I don’t want them to suddenly decide they do just because they found out I married a rich man.”

“It’s not like those are the only possibilities, you know,” he said, toying absently with the edge of his bedsheet and looking like he was trying hard to play casual enough not to upset her. “What if they’d wanted you but couldn’t keep you for some reason?”

She shook her head slightly. “They’d say that regardless, wouldn’t they? The ‘Le Domas Wedding Night Bloodbath’ was national news after the truth started leaking out, Daniel, I’m not going to be able to pretend to be some regular girl looking for her family without them recognizing me.”

When the leaks began happening it was the weirdest part of the media coverage of the wedding. Someone had gotten their hands on the footage the security company had from the house’s cameras- footage that Daniel had abjectly insisted to her could _not_ exist by regular measures. Their security systems had been entirely internal, they wouldn’t have risked anyone outside their home seeing even the yearly goat sacrifices, let alone the possible murder that might end every wedding. Any tapes would have burned with the house.

Within the clips of the night that were shown Daniel and Alex’s places were switched in the early ones, though their actions were the same. Daniel’s obvious hatred of what was going on, the way he could barely even stand to hold the box long enough to pass it on, was clear to her now in a way that it hadn’t been then, as well as Alex’s nervous acceptance. Which of these men, married to her or not, didn’t want to give her up to their family’s horrible ritual and which one would accept it in the end was plainly clear to her now that hindsight had opened her eyes. If she focused hard and accepted a splitting headache in return for the effort she could muzzily make out the truth of the scene underneath the image playing on screen, but no one aside from her and Daniel seemed capable of it. Then there was the long gap of the cameras being out and soon after his role shifted back to the truth again- saving her, being shot for it, struggling even then to save her until the dawn came and ‘fire damage’ to the system made what happened to the rest of the family after she yanked the knife from her arm impossible to make out. The version of events playing out for all the world like he’d been steadfastly on her side the entire time, making the lie that he’d had no idea how the events of the night would play out, that he just hated the tradition of hazing his wife with what the older generation had claimed to be a scare at worse if she drew the wrong card.

He would have been so young at the time the corpse found in the goat pit of the last groom to draw incorrectly had been dated to that nobody had doubted that he’d have been left out of the entire proceedings and only told Helene had been widowed later, everyone apparently blind to the pained guilt Grace could plainly see on his face when he claimed that. Another way Le Bail was smoothing the transition of their lives; it seemed the monster at least played fairly about allowing the winner of his game to fully _win_ , something that the few halting stories about Victor’s time with the demon that Daniel had been willing to share seemed to collaborate.

Her mind came back from following that path to Daniel saying, “I just know how much you were looking forward to a family. Ours might have been a complete flop, but at least you might be able to find a real one out of getting mixed up with it. Instead of being stuck with just me.”

“I like being stuck with just you a lot better than anyone else, or with still just me, you dumbass,” she said affectionately, ruffling his hair with a level of familiarity that had grown over their time recovering together. “And what about you? Your mom wasn’t born in the family, do you have any aunts or uncles or cousins still out there?”

“No fucking clue. Another little Le Domas tradition was new members cutting themselves off from their old family. That one wasn’t part of the deal or anything, just turns out most people can’t stand facing folks who knew them before once they’ve got goat’s blood under their nails.” He looked thoughtful for a moment then added, “My dad did have another sister who took off on Helene’s wedding night. Renounced the family and joined a convent. Maybe I should try to hunt her down at some point and see if that actually saved her.”

“If it did… I think she’d find us if she wanted to be found,” Grace said slowly. “I mean, if somebody’s in the know they’d have to realize what the news about us means, right?”

She hated the way his face fell just the tiniest but at that, like she’d just killed a hope he hadn’t even recognized himself forming for there to be someone else in the world who’d fully understand what he’d been through and the choice he’d decided to make. “But, hey,” she said quietly, taking his hand and lifting it to her lips, “you’re still stuck with me.”

His face softened at those words, and he echoed back at her, “Yeah, and I like being stuck with you better than anyone else.” There was a tiny wounded part of her that still wondered whether that was entirely true, whether if Le Bail had appeared at the end and thrown the curve ball of letting Daniel and Alex both live if she was left to die if he’d have taken it. But the warmth in his eyes soothed it, made her believe that even if the words weren’t 100% true they could still grow to be.

And her survival over his and Alex’s was part of the exact choice he’d been making when he’d chosen to help her anyway, wasn’t it? It was too cruelly suspicious to let herself think the sight of everyone else dying might have shaken that resolve.

* * *

Only the next day Grace ran as well as she was able into his room with a mortified expression on her face, making the nurse who was currently with him give her a chiding look since she was still supposed to have herself pushed in a wheelchair whenever she visited. She ignored that, stared straight at him, and went, “Do you realize they are _absolutely_ going to make a Lifetime movie about us?”

It wasn’t particularly gratifying how he and the nurse both burst into laughter at that, even as the nurse helped her into the bedside chair as if her legs weren’t the only part of her that were completely fine. “What the hell brought this on?” he asked, and maybe looking ridiculous was worth the way he looked brighter than she’d seen him since that night with the laughter still crinkling his eyes.

“Crappy daytime TV,” she said, starting to lean towards him then just sighing and reclining her chair when the nurse gave her another look at almost leaning on her injured arm. Which she’d admit that she deserved, it would be healing a lot faster if she favored it the way she should instead of having her brain stuck in a place where she’d take the pain to be able to move as freely as she was able. It was one of the things her own shrink was trying to break her of. “Seriously, I married into a family of Satanists without knowing it, spent my wedding night being hunted down with only the man I love trying to save me,” her voice only faltered, his expression only flickered, for a second at using the word ‘love’ in front of the nurse for whatever had already been between them on that night, “which you got _shot_ for, then we dragged ourselves out injured but alive in the end. There will _one hundred percent_ be some shitty based on a true story movie based on us.”

He laughed again, shaking his head slightly, “I’ll defer to your knowledge about television for woman, dear. I can get in touch with one of the less awful family lawyers, they can see about selling the rights before anyone starts filing off the serial numbers enough to get away with filming something without our okay. There’re probably be some crime dramas sniffing around too.”

She huffed out a disbelieving breath, staring at him, “Are you really okay with that? Daniel, the way I described it was the _nicest_ way they could go. They could just as easily tear you apart thinking… acting like it’s your fault I went through it all.”

“More likely, even,” the nurse agreed as she finished changing the bandage on Daniel’s arm. “Those movies do love to have their leading lady’s start out in a relationship with a complete bastard.”

Grace gestured to her with a ‘you see?’ expression on her face, but as she continued speaking she softened her voice, willing him to understand just how strongly she meant it when she said, “Daniel, after everything we went through I couldn’t stand to have anyone demonize you.”

He reached out to touch her cheek as if he couldn’t resist it, and she leaned into it. He hardly ever was the one to touch her first, was never the one to seek her out, always seeming like he expected that at any minute she’d finally realize that she couldn’t possibly actually want to have contact with him after everything. She relished the moments when he slipped more and more with every day they spent together. Behind her the nurse slipped away, whether because her job was done or because she recognized this was becoming a private moment Grace couldn’t say. “It would be a fictionalized version anyway,” he said slowly, closing his eyes, his forehead furrowing, and she wished she could bring back the smile from just a minute ago. “If they want a more personal villain that much we could suggest… Alex.”

Her breath stopped completely, long enough that it started to ache, before she managed to choke out, “ _What?_ ”

When his eyes finally opened there was a pained acceptance in them. “If they think they’re fictionalizing the story anyway they could write a version of events where he was the one who married you into that shit-show, and I’m just the drunken brother-in-law who couldn’t stand to let you die.”

“The drunken brother-in-law who I’d have been happier with all along,” she whispered, covering his hand with her’s then turning her face to kiss his palm. “Daniel, I know you don’t want to see him demonized either. I might be absolutely fucking down with dragging his memory through the mud, but I’m not going to ask you to give him up for it.”

He sighed slowly, his thumb grazing a tender path back and forth along her cheekbone. “It’s not like the world is judging him kindly the way things are, Grace. At least they might let him be conflicted this way, instead of just being the fucker who held the knife.”

* * *

He only came to her room once during those first couple weeks in the hospital, late at night like her own first visit. Unlike him when she’d slipped into his room that time, she was actually asleep.

All the hospital staff had learned by then to be careful about waking her if they needed to. The best case scenario when someone wasn’t delicate enough about it was that she’d scream her head off and cringe violently enough to disturb her wounds. Her back, least of her injuries though the cuts across it were, had healed much more slowly than it otherwise should have with the way she kept popping her stitches, and for awhile the doctors had despaired at the state of her shoulder.

Worst case scenario, she’d grab the closest heavy object at hand and try to smash in the face of anyone nearby before she woke up enough to recognize where she was. They had learned to be careful _quickly_.

Daniel was entirely unaware of any of that. Grace had never wanted to worry him by saying something, and, being private rooms for rich bastards, their hospital rooms were startlingly well-soundproofed so he’d never heard her screams. So he just shook her uninjured shoulder, whispering, “Grace. Grace!” in a way that would have made any member of her medical staff want to tackle him.

Then they would have stared in amazement when she only slowly stirred, turning her face to him with a sleepy smile. “Hey, morning,” she whispered.

“Not quite, sorry,” he said, smiling faintly but with strain around his eyes. “Listen, Grace, I need to ask something, and I need you to be honest with me.”

She yawned, shifting up a little in her bed, “When haven’t I been?”

“I’d hope never, but…” he seemed to shake himself slightly, expression firming up, “Did Mr. Le Bail make a deal with you at some point there?”

There was a long stretch of silence, her eyebrows slowly going up as she stared at him, before she finally said in a syrupy sweet tone covering an edge that would put a knife to shame, “Oh, Baby, is this gonna be our first fight as a married couple?”

“I’m serious, Grace,” he said, dragging his hand through his hair. Then, nonsensically to her, he added, “Our baseball team hasn’t lost a single game since your wedding.”

“Good for them?” She was vaguely aware that their season was going on, some of the few visitors she’d gotten since reaching a point where they were allowed had been the coach and a couple members of the team. They’d given both her and Daniel some stilted-sounding words about how they were going to make it to the World Series that year in their names, and one of the orderlies had shown her clips of a press conference with the entire team where they swore the same promise. They were dedicating their season, and every game they won, to their two surviving owners (though Grace hardly thought she should count as one) after the terrible events of their wedding night. They seemed to ignore that that the terrible events in question had been caused by all the rest of their owners, but she couldn’t really blame them for that.

“I was talking to my accountant today and she told me almost every investment she’d made for me has turned a profit while we’ve been hospitalized, and I thought to call _her_ because someone from our video game branch got in touch asking for permission to start testing revolutionary tactile support for VR consoles that they’d had a breakthrough on in the last month.” Once again he raked his hand through his hair but this time he left it there, clenching into the strands, looking a little lost, “The stories about the family deal were always very clear, Grace. We were going to lose our fortune if it was broken. Not have things start going even better than they were while it was active.”

“I mean… they did,” she said slowly, whatever anger she’d felt at his earlier not-so-veiled accusation draining as she recognized his concern. “The rest of the family is dead, they lost it all. You wouldn’t have it either if I’d been a little slower on the ball. Like, did the deal actually say ‘Kill the poor bastard who draws hide and seek or I’ll claim all your lives… and also make your business completely fail just to really _rub it the fuck in_ if you look up from the afterlife’? ‘Cause that sounds like going crazy overboard.” 

Slowly he appeared to relax, sagging back in his seat. “I didn’t think you would, but I had to be sure,” he said apologetically.

“You’re damn right I wouldn’t. Jesus fuck, Daniel, do you think money was _anywhere_ near the top of my mind when all that was going on? Do you think it’s what I’d have bargained on if that fucker did show up? I’d have asked for you and I to both live first… _which I didn’t_ , so stop making that face.”

He slowly seemed to relax again, but there was still the tiniest hint of tightness in his expression that she could see driving him to say, “And you’re sure you never gave him anything he could take advantage of? You never thought ‘I’d do anything to get out of this alive’ or anything like that?”

She dragged her hand down her face, suddenly tired. “Daniel, just… can you assume that I’m enough not a piece of shit that if I’d done that I’d have included the kids in the lives I was bargaining for too? Even the little prick who shot me deserved a chance to grow up into less of a prick.”

Slowly, like he wasn’t quite sure the touch would be welcome, he wrapped his arm loosely around her shoulders and pulled her forward to kiss her on the forehead. “You do have to remember that I’m really not used to dealing with people who _aren’t_ pieces of shit, sorry.”

* * *

Their relationship went on like that, small moments of pulling themselves closer and closer, until it hardly seemed awkward when on the day the hospital gave up and moved them into a single room together—with many round-about threats trying to tell them that they’d _better_ not fuck in their hospital room without saying it that bluntly, but she suspected also some relief that the Le Domas fortune wasn’t being used to horde two private rooms any longer—she said, “Hey… you know, the hospital has a chaplain.”

He raised an eyebrow at the non sequitur, “Yes, they usually do dear. Probably some other religious types too.”

She cheerfully flipped him off. “Don’t be an ass, I’m being serious. Listen, the hospital has a chaplain, and I don’t want _that_ to be our wedding day, even if it’s what shows on whatever paper Le Bail magicked into existence. So do you want to, like, call them up to our room sometime and do something about that?”

Daniel seemed to freeze for a moment before he slowly said, “Grace… are you asking me to marry you?”

She’d gotten the initial question out without a problem, but at his reaction butterflies suddenly shot into motion in her stomach, a few escaping in a sharp laugh as she answered, “I mean, we’re already married, Daniel. This would be more… renewing our vows.”

“Vows we never made to begin with.”

“We kinda did. Well, I kinda did, and even if I was terrified and babbling I stick with what I said back then. And even if that doesn’t count, and you never got to make any in return, isn’t that a good reason on its own?” she slid her hand into his, the feel of his palm now comfortable and familiar to her. “I’d rather not be married to you under the vows I made to the bastard who tried to stab me in the heart. Or have you married to me with the ones you used for the asshole who shot you. Even if we just mimic back the standard vows instead of writing something ourselves, I’d still rather have something real between us instead of just a demon’s magic telling the world you’re my husband.”

She didn’t expect his answer to be his hand tangling into her hair, pulling her into the first kiss that he’d ever been the one to initiate. It was gentle as ever, soft and affectionate, and Grace was struck harder than she’d ever been before by just how hard she knew she’d be able to love a man who could warm her straight through with nothing but a kiss. Even after he pulled away he stayed just a breath away from her lips as he said, “I would love to marry you, Grace.” Then he let his hand drop away from her and added with a laugh, “If I’m going to have one wedding I’m sober enough to remember clearly, I’ll be glad it’s with you.”

When she’d suggested the idea Grace assumed that it would take some time to set up, but already being legally married in the eyes of the universe smoothed over all the wait they normally would have had. When she called the number for the hospital’s chapel they were able to book a visit that very day.

Everyone they told the plan to seemed to understand at once why they would want a ‘second’ ceremony that didn’t end in a slaughter, the main question seemed to be why they didn’t want to wait for a chance to have a properly redone ceremony instead of a hasty exchange of vows in a hospital room before the chaplain moved on to his next appointment of the day. “It really won’t be that much longer before you’re both released,” a nurse told Grace as she wheeled her through the hospital gift shop to find something other than a hospital gown to wear; Daniel had been able to get some of his own clothing brought from home, but Grace would rather burn her entire closet than ever wear anything Alex might have touched her in again. “You could rent somewhere pretty, have another real wedding dress instead of getting married in a t-shirt with our logo on it, God knows Mr. Le Domas— sorry, Mr. Dumas— is rich enough to buy you another one.”

Grace remembered the feeling of her last wedding dress crusted to her body by blood and filth and shuddered hard. “One was enough, thanks,” she said, just the memory of it making her want to take a shower and scrub until her skin ached. The clothing options in the gift shop weren’t quite as dire as the woman was suggesting anyway, the pieces that weren’t oddly touristy feeling were mostly a little boring and shapeless but that worked fine for her main goal of not feeling like she was getting married to Daniel in pajamas. She shied away from the color white, finding instead a comfortable black skirt and a shirt in a cheerful yellow that reminded her of the sneakers that had faithfully gotten her through that fucking night only to vanish with the remains of her wedding dress.

The result was a little bit bumblebee, but Grace liked the idea that her new, real, wedding would only have reminders of the things that had helped her survive that night—Daniel and her comfortable shoes and that was basically it—instead of all the shiny trappings that had just lead her into hell.

As a last minute thought before checkout she grabbed two rings from the jewelery section, cheap plastic children’s things with adjustable bands and garish colors. “There’s no way in hell I’m risking you popping if we pull off the rings Le Bail’s screwed with, so I figured I’d grab something for the ‘With this ring, I thee wed’ part,” she told him as she dropped one in his lap. “Totally don’t expect you to wear it after today, though, I mean, why _wouldn’t_ you want to? Look, I picked you one with a fishy on it!”

When she jokingly waved it in his face to display the neon-green fish blowing bubbles on its face he snorted and said, “God, I love you,” as easily as if it had slipped out without a thought.

For just a second they both froze when what he’d just said actually hit their ears, then Grace’s teasing smile softened into something warmer and she slid his arms around his neck. “Well, I am _incredibly_ lovable, though I don’t think I can beat you on the ‘steal the heart of an in-law’ score what with the life-saving heroics and all.” She bumped her forehead affectionately against his, only the knowledge that she needed to get ready before the chaplain arrived keeping her from giving into the urge to climb into his lap and kiss him until he couldn’t possibly doubt how well his love was received. “Didn’t I promise you that we’ll love the hell out of each other? I wasn’t bullshitting you, Daniel, I knew before we ever got of of that house that if I made it and you didn’t then Alex wasn’t the one I’d be comparing every other man to for the rest of my life.”

He brought his own arms up around her, the injured one only about to loosely curl around her back but the other embracing her tightly enough to make up for it. “It wouldn’t have been that hard to find someone who looked favorable in comparison then.”

“Like _hell_ ,” she said fiercely, without even a scrap of doubt in her heart as she went on, “I could spend my whole life looking, and nobody else would even come close.”

* * *

The wedding itself, if it could even be called that, ended up just being a little blip of nothing in the day, the chaplain in such a rush to get to someone who was dying that they weren’t even given a chance to offer their own vows. Maybe for the best, Grace thought, anything true that she could say about why and how she’d come to want to spend her life with him would make her sound completely insane.

And it wasn’t like she was going to get upset about his needing to comfort the dying when as far as she was concerned she and Daniel were going to live for a long, long, time.

It was the opposite of her wedding to Alex in every way, enclosed in a small room instead of outdoors, no guests save a nurse who alternated between taking photos with a disposable camera and Daniel’s phone, every picture candid instead of the carefully posed shots in front of a camera that probably cost more than a month’s rent on her apartment. No one sneering or judging her from the sidelines, every person who put their heads in to congratulate them just seemed thrilled for both of them that they were choosing to make memories of a new wedding untainted by bloodshed. Instead of a cake almost as tall as she was they had one slice a carrot cake brought up from the hospital cafeteria to smash in each other’s faces, a tradition that Alex had talked her out of as something his family would turn up their noses at. 

Daniel didn’t seem the least bothered by the mess. Instead his eyes darkened when she licked a streak of frosting off his palm.

And, when midnight came at least, no box mysteriously appeared at either of their bedsides, and no scratchy music started playing over the loudspeaker.

Daniel surprised her by barking out a laugh that sounded almost half-sob after enough minutes passed that it definitely wasn’t the clock being off, raking his hand through his hair when she shot him a curious look. “Sorry, but… part of me really thought we were going to need to end tonight breaking out of the hospital to find a goat to kill. Or just…” he splayed his fingers in the air in a bursting motion.

She grabbed her pillow on pushed herself up, crossing to his bed so she could smack him lightly on the head with it. “Then you shouldn’t have said yes, you ass!”

He grabbed her wrists and stared at her with bright eyes, looking suddenly less burdened than she’d ever seen him. “Grace, I will _never_ say no to marrying you,” he told her, then tried for a careless shrug that rather lost its effect on her when the jostling to his still not fully healed shoulder turned it into a flinch, “This isn’t like the past. The worst case scenario would be that the box appears, you draw hide and seek again, and absolutely nothing happens because there’s no one left who would hunt you and apparently your husband gets to survive.”

“That would be an absolutely awful fucking worst case scenario,” she told him firmly, taking his face between both her hands, her thumbs stroking gently down his cheekbones, across his lips. “Both of us living wouldn’t count as a win unless you walked away free too. No more games. No more sacrifices. Le Bail can bite every fucking inch of my ass if he thinks I’ll let him _ever_ touch your life again.”

His lips quirked beneath her thumb and he curled his arms around her, pulling her into his bed beside him like she’d been that very first night she’d come to find him. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re hot as hell when you’d threatening demons?” he asked when she settled against him, her head tucking comfortably beneath his chin and her hand once against settling over his heart.

“When we finally get out of here and I drag you into the first bed I see that isn’t covered in monitors I’ll make sure my dirty talk is all the ways Le Bail can eat shit and die,” she said with a smile as she closed her eyes, letting herself relax. The hospital staff might boot her back into her other room if they tried to fuck, but surely they could be kind enough to look the other way on their checks for one night if all she was doing was sleeping beside her husband? If she stayed there until dawn crept through the window and fully proved that they were fine.

There was long pause before he said, “We are richer than hell, dear. If you’re that eager I could have us picked up by a car that not even the driver would be able to see us in, no need to wait for a bed.” It was the first time that she’d heard him actually accept sleeping with him as something that she _wanted_ , no demonic price for his life necessary. Something she wanted badly, wanted more each time she spoke to him.

She pushed herself back up onto her elbow to look down at him, grinning widely at the way he didn’t quite meet her eyes in an unexpected display of shyness. “Oh, sweetie, if we pick our first time based on how eager _I_ am I’m gonna be dragging you into a bathroom stall on our way out the door.” And when she leaned in to kiss him she didn’t hold herself back at all for the first time, even knowing that they couldn’t let themselves get carried away. She kissed him with every inch of wanting in her, hoping he’d be able to feel, would finally be able to _believe_ , just how terribly she desired him, the man who’d fought against everything he’d ever known and loved just to protect her.

Grace knew that by conventional standards she’d been too quick to jump into both her marriages.

With Alex it should have been a warning to her when he proposed right after she’d told him that she wouldn’t stay with a man if marriage wasn’t a potential prospect in the future. She hadn’t meant it as any sort of threat or ultimatum, hadn’t meant that if he kept dating her it meant that she expected him to marry her someday. She’d only meant that after a few months of their relationship mostly just being the two of them fucking every time they had a moment of privacy they needed to either see if they could click in a way that might eventually turn deeper or go their separate ways, because she wasn’t interested in just being some guy’s booty call.

It should have been a warning, but instead she’d thought it was the most romantic thing in the world that he’d already known she was the one. Thought their chemistry was a real connection, that what little talking they’d done had been enough to spark love. Hadn’t thought that the speed of his proposal was because somewhere in the back of his mind he had taken the mental voyage from ‘She will eventually leave me if she doesn’t think we might one day get married,’ to ‘she will leave me if I don’t marry her,’ before finally ending on ‘possibly getting her killed without warning would be better than having her leave me.’

With Daniel maybe she should have been shyer of marriage, trauma over the first wedding making her drag her feet on ever having a second. Instead she felt absolute security knowing that, whatever happened, he would choose her. Whoever stood against them, he would choose her. Whatever it cost, he would choose her. 

And she would stand in front of all the forces of hell to choose him back.

She didn’t how he could be so slow to accept that she really did want him, want him both as her husband and in her bed, but she would convince him one day at a time for however long it took before he really believed it.

Until they could get somewhere more free she’d happy to kiss him breathless however many times it took to get that through his mind.


End file.
